[DG: Open Forum] Sakai OAE

[Lydia Li]

I agree with Nicola. 

There is a group of dedicated people who have been working hard on CLE, doing bug fixes, adding new features, doing release management, patching release branches, hosting QA instances and providing support for institutions like ours that depend on CLE.  

On a separate note, maybe Sakai 2.9 will finally release soon ?

thanks,
Lydia

----- Original Message -----
| From: "Nicola Monat-Jacobs" <nicola at longsight.com>
| To: "David Adams" <daveadams at gmail.com>
| Cc: openforum at collab.sakaiproject.org
| Sent: Friday, September 7, 2012 3:49:54 PM
| Subject: Re: [DG: Open Forum] Sakai OAE
| 
| 
| > For years now, the CLE has stagnated
| 
| 
| I don't wholly agree. Could it have used more resources during this
| period? Most definitely. But there has been a core group of people
| who've been trying to continue to bring innovation to CLE. Was/Is
| there still a danger of stagnation? Yes.
| 
| 
| 
| On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 3:39 PM, David Adams < daveadams at gmail.com >
| wrote:
| 
| 
| 
| Mark Norton wrote:
| > How much change to the architecture will be needed? Is it "back to
| > the
| > drawing board" or just a matter of tuning things up?
| 
| After four years, the system can't support more than a few dozen
| users
| at a time, or search through more than a few thousand objects.
| Meanwhile, the potential customers need to operate and hundreds or
| thousands of times that scale. The architecture has been flawed from
| the start; built on false assumptions, buzzwords, and crossed
| fingers.
| 
| In designing the OAE, all the clever and interesting parts of the
| CLE's design were thrown away, and all the weird and broken things
| about the CLE's design were doubled-down on. Anti-RDBMS sentiment has
| been behind most of the poor design and performance problems in CLE,
| and we see that things are that much worse now that the RDBMS has
| been
| eschewed entirely. The ironic part is, the NoSQL storage system
| itself
| is actually just an application that uses an RDBMS for storage.
| 
| Developers hate thinking about how the data gets stored and having to
| worry about optimizations, but adding another layer of abstraction
| does not eliminate those details, it just makes them much harder to
| address. RDBMSes may be boring and awkward, but they're mature, well
| understood, well supported, and easy to optimize. Yes, it's old
| technology, but the reason we still have relational databases is that
| they actually turn out to be an amazingly efficient way to store
| data.
| 
| 
| >> OAE does not have all the features of an LMS
| > 
| > How big a gap is this? Is there a chart of targeted features with
| > status? If not, why not?
| 
| The gap is complete. OAE has no distinctly LMS-type features. Vague
| nods to the need for these have shown up in various roadmaps
| (generally released each summer), but always at the elusive "stage
| three" milestone that never actually gets reached. If anything, the
| story of OAE is that it long ago moved from being an attempt to write
| an LMS to being an attempt to write a *platform* for someone else to
| write an LMS. That it's attempting to build a generic platform on top
| of other generic platforms (Sling, Jackrabbit, etc) may be part of
| the
| problem.
| 
| 
| >> 1. and 2. are taking too long
| > 
| > It wasn't a resource issue until most of the big players left. Why
| > is it
| > taking too long?
| 
| If you've read Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, it's no
| mystery. The lack of technical leadership, poor communication, lack
| of
| documentation, vague design goals, the Second-System Effect,
| inconsistent staffing, mission creep. As to our current situation,
| facing a broken system that needs a redesign, we should turn to John
| Gall's The Systems Bible: "A complex system designed from scratch
| never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over,
| beginning with a working simple system." To write a successful
| complex
| LMS, we would need to start from a successful simple LMS.
| 
| The Sakai Foundation should take this as a perfect opportunity to
| abandon the OAE project and direct whatever resources are left into
| improving the CLE. For years now, the CLE has stagnated while the OAE
| was sold as being just around the corner, highly capable, and
| providing a smooth transition from the CLE, none of which was true.
| It's time to set the record straight, admit the OAE has failed, and
| save whatever credibility is left. Put the resources that still exist
| into improving the working system we do have instead of pouring
| endless resources into a non-working system that has no chance of
| ever
| being fixed.
| 
| -dave
| _______________________________________________
| openforum mailing list
| openforum at collab.sakaiproject.org
| http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/openforum
| 
| TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to
| openforum-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of
| "unsubscribe"
| 
| 
| _______________________________________________
| openforum mailing list
| openforum at collab.sakaiproject.org
| http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/openforum
| 
| TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to
| openforum-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of
| "unsubscribe"